Enemies Closer (24 page)

Hearing a rustling sound, Clara turned her head to see the beam of Ben’s flashlight bouncing over the rough terrain. When he came closer, she could make out a huge bolt cutter in one of his hands.

“We’re going to get you out of here, Maddy. Ben has bolt cutters. There’s a door on the other side of the cellar, we just have to get it open.” She handed Maddy the lantern. “Will you be okay for a minute?” Maddy nodded nervously and Clara reluctantly went to help Ben.

By the time she got to him he had already cut through the chain. He dropped the bolt cutters and pulled the chain through the handles, throwing it behind him. Each taking one of the heavy wooden doors, Clara and Ben lifted them up and away from the entrance to the old root cellar.

Maddy stood below them, crying and filthy but in one piece. A terrible odor of loam and waste and stale air wafted through the entrance. “Should we get a ladder?” Clara asked Ben without turning from her sister. The cellar was eight feet deep and there were no stairs.

But Maddy looked panicked and cried, “Just get me out of here!”

“Okay, okay, Maddy.” Ben was already bracing both hands on the doorframe. He swung down into the pit and dropped to the dirt floor; the second he landed, Maddy threw her arms around him. A moment later he had her on his shoulders and handed her out into Clara’s arms.

Jumping up to grip the doorframe again, Ben used the wall of the cellar to climb back out. He found both women crouched on the ground, holding one another and crying. They turned and looked up at him and Clara said quietly, “My hero.”

He squatted next to them. “Are you hurt?” he asked Maddy.

“Just bruised and dirty,” she said, smiling through her tears and standing.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” said Clara, picking up the piece of heavy chain and leading her sister back toward the house. “Do you know who did this?”

Maddy just shook her head in frustration. “I vaguely remember Monday—” She stopped suddenly. “What day is it?”

“It’s Saturday, Maddy,” said Clara tightening her grip around her sister’s waist.

“Oh god.” Anger passed over Maddy’s expression. “I know I was having dinner with someone Monday night, but I don’t remember with whom, or where, or even if I made it.”

“You and I had dinner Monday night at Gigi’s,” said Ben. “We think you were taken just after that.”

They had reached the clearing, and when Maddy Gardner saw the house she stopped dead in her tracks as realization hit her. “This is Michelle and Eddie’s place. This…” Her voice trailed off as fear and betrayal overwhelmed her. Maddy’s knees wobbled and Clara and Ben had to keep her from falling.

“Try not to think about that now, Maddy,” said Ben. “We need to get to a hospital, we can call the police along the way.”

“I don’t think I’m hurt,” Maddy protested half-heartedly as they made their way to the Jeep.

“We have to be sure,” replied Ben. He had every intention of having Maddy checked out. Even if she was fine, the police might still be able to find evidence of whoever had abducted her.

They helped Maddy into the back seat and Ben found a blanket for her. She was shivering, whether from shock or cold or injury, they weren’t sure. Ben was already driving when he commanded his iPhone to take them to the closest emergency room.

Clara’s phone was already ringing Detective Judy Carlisle.

“Detective Carlisle, it’s me, Clara Gardner.”

“Clara,” said Carlisle hearing urgency in her voice, “did you find anything?”

Thirty seconds later, Kincaid heard his partner say, “We’re on our way.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“They found Maddy. She’s alive. They’re taking her to Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon.”

Kincaid’s eyes widened. He knocked on the door to the interview room and waited for one of the detectives to come out. When Tanaka emerged they told him Maddy had been found in Eddie and Michelle’s country home. “Clara says she doesn’t know who took her. I’m guessing she was drugged. We have to drive up there now.”

They left the precinct in an unmarked car. Traffic wasn’t too bad heading out of town at this time of the evening, and once they were on the interstate, the road opened up. Kincaid was driving, so Carlisle made the call to the Skagit Valley Sheriff’s Office and was patched through to the sheriff himself. She explained the circumstances in Seattle, the possible abduction, the murder. She told him they would want to get a crime scene unit to the Perkins house and read him the address from her notebook.

When she hung up, she turned to her partner. “He’s on it. Says he’ll send an officer to the hospital as well.”

Kincaid turned on the flashers with no siren and took off.

The emergency room was moderately busy at seven-thirty on a Saturday night, but a call from the local sheriff’s office got Maddy into the examination room ahead of the flu symptoms and the kid who may or may not have swallowed a nickel.

She sat on the edge of hospital bed, looking even filthier surrounded by stainless steel and white paper sheets. She had changed into a pale blue hospital gown and a police officer had put her clothing into a brown paper evidence bag. He had had some trouble with the heavy cuff on Maddy’s wrist, but had finally gotten it open when another officer dropped off a set of lock picks on his way to the crime scene at Eddie and Michelle’s house. Clara stood next to her while they waited for a doctor to come in.

“I can’t believe you lived through the car ride,” said Maddy. “I nearly choked to death on the stench myself.”

Clara was glad that her sister seemed to be taking this process in stride, even joking about it, but she knew that Maddy was in shock. She decided to go along with it for now and hoped that Maddy would open up once she was home safe, curled up in clean pajamas, scratching Bea behind the ears. “It wasn’t easy.”

“Shut up, Clara,” said Maddy with a smile. “Hey, make sure that Mom and Dad don’t try to fly out here.”

During the twenty-minute drive to the hospital, Clara had called home and told her parents that Maddy was safe. Then she put her sister on the line. “I just know they’re going to want to come fuss over me, and Dad needs to rest.”

“They’re going to come fuss over you whether you like it or not. Plus, Dad’s doing great. But I’ll try to delay them for a day or two, so you can catch your breath.”

“Thanks, Clara.”

There was a knock at the door and a male doctor came in with a female nurse. “Miss Gardner, I’d like to examine you now. Then the police will be in to collect samples and talk to you about what happened.”

Clara asked her sister if she would be all right and then stepped through the door to give her some privacy. She found Ben sitting with the sheriff and one of his deputies.

“This is Clara Gardner,” said Ben. “Madeline’s sister.”

The sheriff stood. “Sheriff Harley.”

They spent the next twenty minutes going over the events of the afternoon and evening with the sheriff asking questions and his deputy taking notes. Hanley raised an eyebrow when Ben said he had broken into the Perkinses’ house, but said nothing. Finally he stood and said, “Okay, folks. We’ll need your fingerprints for elimination.” He pointed to a woman standing by the nurses’ station. “Otherwise, that’ll do for now. I’ll get a statement from Madeline and then you’re all free to go back home. If we need a formal interview, I can probably arrange something with the police department in Seattle so you don’t have to drive back up here.”

He and his deputy led them over to the crime scene technician, who held a silver Halliburton case at her side. After they had been printed, Ben bought Clara a Coke from the vending machine.

A few minutes later, the door to the exam room opened and the doctor and his nurse came out.

“She’d like to speak with you,” the doctor said to Clara.

When she walked into the room, Maddy’s eyes lit up. “Coke! I haven’t had caffeine since Monday.”

Clara handed her the can and Maddy took a long drink. “Ah!” she said dramatically and closed her eyes. “They gave me a clean bill of health, not too much poking or prodding. That’ll come next.”

“When the crime scene woman comes in?”

“Woman? Oh, thank god. The doctor told me they would have to take some swabs and check under my fingernails. He said that even though I’m sure I wasn’t raped they will want to take a vaginal swab. He also said that I was probably drugged with Rohypnol when I was taken, but it won’t show up in my system anymore.” She ran a hand through her dirty hair. “I told him there was a place I used for a toilet in the cellar, and he told me the crime scene people would be able to test there. Ick.” She wrinkled her nose.

“And, he said I show signs of light sedation or anxiety medication even now, but they won’t know for sure until my blood tests come back. The bruising on my body was likely from when I was lowered into the cellar and chained up. That’s what he thinks. I don’t remember any of it.” She looked down at her filthy hands. “They’re going to take my fingerprints to exclude them if they find more down there.”

“That’s okay, Maddy. We’re going to figure out who did this and put him in jail forever.”

“Clara, I can’t believe that Eddie or Michelle had anything to do with this, but I can’t think of any other way to explain why I was being kept on their property.” She groaned in frustration. “Will you send in the cavalry?”

Clara left the room and nodded to the sheriff. “She’s ready.”

Twenty minutes later the technician came out of the examination room, followed ten minutes later by a nurse and then by Maddy herself, showered and clad in a set of blue hospital scrubs and matching knit booties with non-stick grips on the bottom. Everyone turned to look at her and she said, “I know you still have questions but I can’t spend another minute in that cold room.”

Then the doors to the ER flew open like a scene in a movie and Detectives Carlisle and Kincaid marched into the room, stopping short when they saw Maddy standing there. She looked frail in the oversized scrubs; one of her wrists was encircled with purple bruises, her fingers were covered in bandages and they could see another large contusion peering out from one of the short sleeves of the blue shirt.

“Maddy Gardner?” asked Kincaid. She nodded. “Thank god.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

H
alf an hour later Maddy, Clara and Ben were back in the Jeep, on their way home to Seattle. Maddy was curled up in the back seat, dozing. After she’d spoken to the sheriff and the detectives from Seattle and had told them everything she knew, which wasn’t much, she told everybody that she just wanted to go home. Carlisle and Kincaid said they’d check in with her later that night and come talk to her in the morning.

“For now, Miss Gardner, don’t tell anyone you’re home,” Kincaid had told her gently. But the insinuation was clear and disturbing; he meant Michelle and Eddie and anyone else who might want to do her harm.

Now Carlisle, Kincaid and Sheriff Harley stood on the gravel drive of Eddie and Michelle Perkins’s country house. The wood on the north side of the property was bright as day with portable floodlights and flashbulbs going off every few seconds. The normally peaceful Pacific Northwest forest looked like a scene from the X-Files. The detectives followed Sheriff Harley about a thousand feet into the forest, where two large wooden doors opened to a hole in the earth.

Investigators had placed two aluminum ladders in the cellar and lit the place up like a warehouse. One technician was passing up evidence bags when Carlisle and Kincaid approached. The sheriff took one of the bags and peered through the plastic. “This must be the toolbox lid she used to break the chain.” It was mangled and covered in Maddy’s blood.

Another technician walked over. “We’ve got no fingerprints except the victim’s and her friends’, not even on the hardware. The handles on the door are brand new, probably put there for this purpose. She was shackled to one of the support poles down there with a six-foot, quarter-inch chain. The chain itself has been used for heavy work, maybe towing, and it was already damaged or she would never have been able to get it open. But even untethered she couldn’t have gotten out of there on her own.” Another load of evidence bags appeared from the mouth of the cellar. The tech pointed. “She had plenty of dry food – probably nothing a gourmet chef wants to eat, but enough to last another week. Water is another story. There are still several unopened jugs of distilled water, but they show signs of tampering. We found puncture marks in the plastic lids. The perpetrator could have laced the water with a mild sedative to keep the victim mellow. Or arsenic to kill her slowly. Who knows.” He shook his head in disgust and went back to overseeing the collection of evidence.

“I want to go down there,” said Carlisle.

“All right,” said the sheriff and pointed toward the ladder.

She removed her blazer, exposing the leather shoulder holster on her left side, and draped it over an errant sawhorse meant to erect another evidence table if needed. Carlisle looked expectantly at her partner, who obligingly removed his own suit coat and followed her down the ladder.

The smell of dirt and decay hung heavily over the small space, tinged with the faint odor of human waste. The cellar was brightly lit, but Carlisle could imagine what it was like in the dark. Maddy must have felt like she was tied up in a rabbit hole. The tiny window, high up on the east wall, would not have provided much daylight even in the morning hours.

“She wouldn’t have had any light to see,” said Kincaid, having the same thought. “She must have been terrified.”

Carlisle nodded. It was hard to imagine how Maddy Gardner must have felt when she woke up in this solitary prison, chained to a pole like an animal, in the dark, with nothing to comfort her but an old sleeping bag and a crate of snack cakes and granola bars. The detectives climbed back up to the surface and took another look at the growing piles of evidence before walking to the house with Sheriff Harley.

“Have you found anything inside?” asked Kincaid, nodding at the house and garage.

“Not yet. Crime scene guys don’t think she was ever in there.”

“Any sign of her purse or cell phone?”

“Nope. Probably at the bottom of the channel.”

The detectives stayed for another quarter of an hour and then got back in the unmarked and headed for Seattle. This time Carlisle drove.

“I’m going to check in with Iverson and Tanaka,” said Kincaid, pulling out his phone.

Iverson answered on the first ring. “What did you find?” he demanded. Earlier, when Carlisle and Kincaid told him where Madeline Gardner had been found, Tanaka had called Iverson out of the interview room. They decided to use the information to squeeze Eddie a little harder. Unfortunately, now that Eddie had invoked his right to an attorney, they couldn’t say another word to him until his lawyer arrived. Rather, they could say something to him, but anything he said back would be inadmissible. No point in squeezing him yet. Eddie invoked and the interview stopped.

The two homicide detectives were hoping that Carlisle and Kincaid would find some piece of indisputable evidence in La Conner so that they could arrest Eddie for kidnapping without concern that his attorney would have him out the minute he was arraigned. So far, everything they had was circumstantial. Sure, his prints were on the murder weapon, but because he had been Susan Burns’s lover, there was a reasonable explanation. The DA had gotten a search warrant for Eddie’s condo, based on the discovery of Maddy Gardner on his property up north, and when he invoked, the detectives made the call to execute it even though one of them would have to remain at the station with their suspect. Tanaka had gone to supervise the search and Iverson sat at his desk while the lawyer conferred with his client. To make an arrest stick they either needed Eddie to confess or they needed to find incontrovertible proof that he had killed Susan and kidnapped Madeline.

When Eddie’s attorney had arrived half an hour ago, Iverson had debated whether or not to tell Eddie that Maddy had been found on his property. He was still debating when his phone rang. “What?”

At the sound of Iverson’s voice, Kincaid grimaced; if the detective was this tense they probably hadn’t gotten anything out of Eddie. “We got Maddy chained up in an old root cellar on Eddie’s property, but so far no evidence that Eddie put her there.”

“Of course he put her there! Who the hell else would have put her there?”

“It’s early, Don. They’ve got lots left to search. I’m sure something will turn up.”

“Shit. Maddy still doesn’t remember?”

“Nope. The doc thinks she was drugged with Rohypnol. All she remembers is waking up in a hole. Did the lawyer get there?”

“They’re in a conference room even as we speak. Strategizing.”

“Do you have enough to arrest him?”

“Yeah, yeah, but the DA’s office says it’s weak. He’ll go home after arraignment if we don’t find anything else, and that’ll look bad for the prosecutor if he goes to trial. Right now Tanaka is executing the search at Eddie’s condo and I’m going to try to stall until we get something.”

“Sorry we don’t have anything for you,” said Kincaid, meaning it. He didn’t want them to have to cut Eddie Perkins loose. He wanted to be able to tell Maddy that she was safe. Kincaid got off the phone and they drove for a while in silence.

“Maybe she’ll remember something,” said Carlisle without enthusiasm.

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe we’ll get a lead from the news. Maddy’s photo went out on the six o’clock broadcast. Someone had to have seen something.”

He checked his watch. Ten o’clock. “Do we tell them she’s been found alive and healthy for the eleven o’clock?”

“No. I don’t want any of the players in this mess to know there’s potentially a live witness.” She glanced over and saw the look of frustration on her partner’s face. She patted him on the knee. “We’ll get him, Kincaid. We found Maddy and now we’ll nail her kidnapper to the wall.”